Well, I guess we can conclude that the DemProgs have conceded the 2020 election.
Well, I guess we can conclude that the DemProgs have conceded the 2020 election.
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
My Back Pages
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
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Search American Digest’s Back Pages
The People Yes
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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alleged, if, unnamed sources, as quoted by, etc., etc.
Clearing the dead leaves out the bed of my truck yesterday, I had to move the spare tire laying in the middle. A mamma forest mouse went scurrying from underneath with 4 tiny babies suck to her belly. She ran to the tailgate which was shut, and squeezed through a place where the edge of the bedliner stuck out from the side of the bed, and disappeared. Unfortunately one of the babies became dislodged and lay there writhing with closed eyes. I stood there watching. After a minute mama poked her head out and looked about frantically. Side to side, up and down, then at the baby laying about 6 inches away. With my big self looming up above. What to do? WHAT TO DO??? She darted out and touched the baby with her nose than ran behind the liner, turned around and stuck her haed out again. She was vibrating with nervousness. She eased forward, then pulled back. Over an over she did this. Finally, she ran out, risking all, grabbed the baby with her mouth and ran back behind the liner, never to be seen again. Later, I unconnected the bedliner from the wall and peered down in there. Hundreds of acorns had been accumulated. 1 acorn per 1 mouse per trip. The effort to gather those nuts was unfathomable. Her nervousness at being disattached to her baby was unmistakable and thus her future actions were inestimable. She will do wahetevr it takes, even risk her life, to get her baby.
The dems are the mama mouse and they will do whatever it takes to regain the whitehouse, even risk their lives, and yours. If mama mouse had lunged at me I would have swatted her in mid air, killing her. I don’t need a 2nd case of rabies, once is enough. You may have to swat some american communists. Can you, and will you, do it when the time comes?
This shit is getting frequent. 2 presidents before, and then 2 in my lifetime, have borne the political brunt of impeachment: Nixon and Clinton. Nixon short-circuited his (presidential authority was bigger than himself so he manned up and resigned) and Clinton (not too big for anything – harrrumphff! – ) yet profited by getting reelected after his impeachment stopped short (another pun!) of removal (oh, I am cracking myself up).
Trump’s impeachment, if it materializes, follows on the greatest political animus in our lifetimes. WTF did Biden and his on get up to in Ukraine? While Putin was breaking down the front door, Hillary, Obama, and Biden where entering the back (stop with the jokes already). It seems that Ukraine has become the tart of Europe, and I don’t mean a sweet one. I’m not the authority on this, but I recall some of Hillary’s corrupt dossier dealings began in Ukraine, didn’t they? She went after her election opponent with the smelly fishwrap that eventuated into the dismally failing Russian collaboration hoax.
Biden had no such mission; his was pretty much monetary rape in the Ukraine. If Trump pressed for the investigation of Biden’s dorky, smarmy offput son, is that the crime they dems want to press? Looks specious and a good lawyer could drive a Mack truck through the holes in that. Are the dems after 2 birds with one stone? They wish to kill both Biden and Trump at the same time?
Wha’s the best popcorn and adult beverage to get for this shitshow? As I recall, after Clinton’s impeachment his base rode that into an election success for the old deviant. If I read Americans correctly, they still care somewhat for policy; Ukraine is a tergle of smelly something on the stage of world politics. Trump’s Ukraine policies are sounder than any other. Crunch, munch, slurpppp. This is starting to get fun.
@Casey Klahn
Mr. Klahn, Bill’s impeachment came near the end of his second term in office, although his popularity did increase during that process.
It would seem that Mr. Trump’s popularity is already increasing…
And as for you sniper…. here’s a previous mouse meditation:
On Turning up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave
’S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss ’t!
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
I went to drive my truck this morning and my wife prohibited it.
Babies.
See, when the mama inadvertantly left one baby behind I txtd my wife and told her to come out to my truck and she did. She got all wobbly. Baby. When she heard through a female neighbor that another female neighbor way down the road that we don’t know, had a baby she ordered a bunch of outfits from amazon and hauled em down there. Babies.
This past summer our grad daughter turned 5, so my wife sent her 5 gifts. Last year, 4. She’ll always be a baby in my wifes eyes, even when she’s 30 years old. Same with our son though she has long stopped sending gift quantities equal to his age.
So for the first time ever, this afternoon I yanked the bedliner out of my truck to show her the mouse and babies were no longer there. Good idea actually cause it allowed me to clean out stuff that had been under there for who knows how long. So yes, bedliners work. That is, if you want the bed of your 30 year old truck to look 30 years newer then the rest of it.
As for mama mousey and the 4 kids? Don’t know. But I imagine one day I will see any of them in the workshop though I won’t be able to swear on it. See, racist that I am, they all look the same to me.
Bill: thank you. I’m happy if I can remember where my car keys are these days.
I meant “Steve”! See?